Resources for writers who want to improve the style, structure, and impact of their stories.

Books on style and voice

• Walter Mosley’s Elements of Fiction is a great guide for sharpening your own voice and style to make your story stand out.

• Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin is an easy-to-follow handbook on crafting a well-structured narrative and polishing your writing style. This book has excellent tips on point of view and sentence construction.

• Do I Make Myself Clear? is written by journalist Harold Evans and has great advice for those of us who tend to write wordy and convoluted texts.

• Authors looking for structured writing practice should grab Kate Grenville’s The Writing Book: A Workbook for Fiction Writers.

• Crafting Novels and Short Stories by the editors of Writer’s Digest is a great resource for plotting your novel and making sure its structure is sound.

Books on self-editing for writers

• Writers who want to improve their self-editing skills should read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King.

• Grammar 101 is an easy-to-use resource for grammar rules and conventions.

• The Subversive Copy Editor is written by Carol Fisher Saller, a fantastic editor and Chicago Manual of Style guru, and guides writers on following grammatical convention without compromising their own writing style. Saller has great advice for anyone looking to get published.

• Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer is one of the most widely-used guides on grammar and style for authors. I find the sections on commonly misspelled words and the list of “confusables” to be quite helpful (is it hawk or hock?).

• The Elements of Style by Strunk and White is often regarded as the ultimate resource on English grammar.

Online grammar and editing resources

• Bookmark Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary and you’ll never confuse attain and obtain again.

• Grammar Girl’s website and podcast are great resources for tricky grammar rules and fun language facts.

• This online tool will tag the parts of speech in any section of text that you enter.

• Figaro posts wonderful ruminations on figures of speech, colloquialisms, and various linguistic gaffs.

• The Conscious Style Guide is your best resource for staying on top of inclusive and bias-free language.

• If you’re writing historical or period fiction, you can use the Timelines of Slang, the Historical Thesaurus, and Online Etymology Dictionary to make sure your language and dialogue correctly reflect the time period.

• There are so many more! If we are working together on a project and you have specific questions, I’ll be able to share multiple resources so that we can learn alongside one another.

Information about finding and hiring editors

• The Editorial Freelancers Association has a guidebook for new authors about hiring editors.

• The Editorial Freelancers Association also publishes the median rates for copyediting, proofreading and other editing services.

• Editing and publishing expert Jane Friedman has a very helpful online guide for finding, hiring, and working with editors.